Sunday, February 27, 2011

Having noticed that I hadn't updated my FreeBSD 8.2 RC2 for a while (and that, strangely, no orange star alerting me to this omission had appeared in my Gnome panel), I did a protupgrade by simply issuing these commands:

# portsnap fetch update# portupgrade -a

Took a long time (about 15 hours) but everything seemed to go fine.BTW, as it's probably best to run this overnight, you really do need to pre-select the compile options before hand otherwise, you could find in the moring that your upgrade has been waiting for your input all noight and nothing much has happened. However, right now I'm not too sure how to run something like "make configure" before "portupgrade -a" but I'll certainly find out.In any event, after the upgrade, when "pkg_version -vl "However, I had no 3D effects and therefore no AWN dock.So, what was wrong?Perhaps my NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-260.19.36 driver was corrupted. So, I tried to install it again.But, I couldn't get it to install in GUI mode as it complained that Xorg was running.OK, so reboot into single user mode, mount the slices ad4s3d/e/f on /var, /tmp and /usr and then try the driver install againThis time the install stopped because /boot/modules/nvidia.ko was a read-only file system.In desperation, I tried

pkill -15 Xorg

and, instead of killing X, it actually opened the GUI and this time the 3D effects appeared as if there had never been a problem.Since then I have rebooted 3 or 4 times and never had a problem.I really don't understand this and I'm not sure what to recommend should it happen again.But, my first thoughts would be to boot into single user mode and pkill Xorg. Of course, it's impossible to feel comfortable about a recommendation that is both inexplicable and counterintuitive.

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